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David Inserra

Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett

A government funding deadline is approaching this Friday, December 20, and congressional leadership appears poised to punt the annual funding debate to March with a stopgap funding measure. Disaster aid is at the heart of the current impasse. President Biden requested nearly $100 billion in emergency funding in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton earlier last month, plus $24 billion for Ukraine. A host of nondisaster-related issues might hitch a ride on this year’s continuing resolution, including several health policy and farm extenders. On top of this, certain Social Security beneficiaries may get boosted benefits (at everyone else’s expense), with the Senate planning to consider the Social Security Fairness Act later this week. 

With federal deficits already in the trillions, lawmakers should approach this funding debate skeptically, avoiding unnecessary and expensive add-ons that are all too common in emergency funding packages. At a minimum, Congress should offset new emergency spending wherever possible and pair the package with commonsense budget reforms to promote future fiscal restraint.

While most of Biden’s budget request addresses Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the administration has included several items that are entirely unrelated to the most recent hurricanes and hardly qualify as emergencies (necessary, sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and temporary). 

For instance, $216 million is earmarked to increase base pay for the Forest Service’s wildland firefighting force. Another $733 million is allocated to replace two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “hurricane hunter” aircraft not slated for decommissioning until 2030. Billions more would be distributed among various agencies for long-term infrastructure and modernization upgrades. These issues are foreseeable and non-urgent. Accordingly, they should be funded through the regular appropriations process, if at all, not through emergency supplemental funding, which receives less oversight and is more prone to waste, fraud, and abuse.

The current disaster funding debate offers Congress an opportunity to address systemic issues in federal disaster relief. Privatizing the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), for example, would align costs with actual risks, incentivize safer development, and minimize taxpayer exposure to repetitive losses. Additionally, Congress should adopt procedural reforms to strengthen fiscal responsibility, including:

offsetting emergency spending with equivalent budget cuts;
raising voting thresholds for emergency appropriations to reduce abuse; and
requiring justifications for how proposed funding qualifies as an emergency.

For more ideas, see our “Proposals to Reform the Emergency Spending Process.”

On top of the mostly hurricane-related disaster relief, several other funding plus-ups have been floated.

Ukraine funding: Biden has requested $24 billion in new foreign aid. It’s been nearly three years since Russia invaded Ukraine, and Congress has spent upwards of $174 billion on the conflict with mixed results. Congress should not funnel more money to Ukraine through the emergency loophole, especially since Biden made no effort to propose offsets.
Farm subsidies: GOP leadership is considering a one-year farm bill reauthorization and haggling with Democrats about direct economic aid to farmers. Congress should focus on cutting wasteful subsidies and reducing taxpayer costs rather than passing plus-ups to farm aid that benefits wealthy households.
Francis Scott Key Bridge funding: House Democrats are reportedly requesting the federal government to pay for 100 percent of the $2 billion cost of rebuilding Baltimore’s collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge. The federal government does not need to burden taxpayers with another costly infrastructure project. Instead, lawmakers might consider authorizing a private firm to build and operate the new bridge, reducing taxpayer liability.
Health policy: Congressional negotiators may reauthorize and extend several health programs as part of the stopgap package, including Medicare telehealth, the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, and the SUPPORT Act. Few, if any, of these programs qualify as urgent emergencies requiring inclusion in a stopgap measure. For example, Medicare telehealth subsidies, initially justified under the COVID-19 emergency, have become a $2.4 billion recurring expense. Congress should reject last-minute rubber-stamped approvals that undermine accountability and drive up costs.

Legislators should reject funding proposals that could reasonably be addressed through the normal appropriations process. Any genuine emergency needs should be offset by eliminating wasteful, low-priority, or duplicative spending elsewhere in the budget.

As a separate issue, the Senate will likely consider voting on the Social Security Fairness Act, which would repeal the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset. Such a change would unfairly increase benefits for individuals with earnings not subject to Social Security taxation and cost taxpayers an additional $196 billion over 10 years. Additionally, it would accelerate Social Security deficits.

If you add everything together, Congress is considering adding more than $300 billion to 10-year deficits this week before including interest costs. With a new administration and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, preparing to get underway, Congress should turn a new leaf on its overspending habit and embrace fiscal responsibility. 

Rejecting a massive end-of-year emergency supplemental and embracing broader reforms would be a meaningful first step toward restoring budget discipline.

Norbert Michel and Jerome Famularo

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States experienced a much higher rate of inflation than at any time during the prior few decades. Like the prices of many goods and services, the cost of housing rose rapidly, with the median home price increasing by almost $100,000. (Figure 1.) Unsurprisingly, many potential homebuyers were—and still are —shocked and upset.

As they have in years past, many politicians have latched on to the anger surrounding the recent housing market turmoil. During the presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “Here’s the thing: we know that we have a shortage of homes and housing. And the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people.” Prior to the election, Donald Trump outlined his own solutions, and now federal officials want to implement a host of policies, ranging from subsidies to selling federal land.

But is the United States really facing a housing crisis? Or a shortage of homes? And should Americans really expect recent federal policy proposals to make housing more affordable?

This Cato at Liberty post is the fourth in a series that examines these questions. (Previous posts are here, here, and here.) While the series presents evidence that the United States is not facing a true housing crisis or shortage, nothing in the series suggests that local officials should refrain from relaxing zoning restrictions and other regulations. Elected officials should reduce rules and regulations to make it easier and less costly for people to live. Additionally, federal officials should end the many demand-side policies that place upward pressure on prices across the nation.

Just as important, nothing in the series ignores that many Americans have taken an economic beating these past few years—real wages have fallen, and prices have not reverted to pre-COVID levels. It is no surprise that so many people have been calling for increased government intervention.

As previously, though, if federal officials answer those calls, it will likely increase Americans’ economic burden. Evidence shows that over the long term people have overcome the many federal roadblocks that increase the nominal cost of housing, but affordability would be much improved in the absence of those policies.

Fortunately, federal officials have an excellent opportunity to make it easier for Americans to afford housing because the lessons learned from the post-COVID-19 inflationary episode are directly applicable to the housing market. In both cases, federal policies that distort demand and supply result in harmful outcomes. The housing market is just a microcosm of what can go wrong—and how difficult it can be to fix—when the federal government interferes with markets.

This post begins to investigate whether there is a shortage of new homes, or a scarcity in construction. It explores the importance of demand in housing markets, an often-overlooked subject in the housing affordability debate.

As previous posts in this series have argued, it is difficult to characterize the US housing market as one in crisis. Even though the US population increased by 130 million people during the past five decades, the homeownership rate remained stable outside of the 2008 crisis. In fact, the homeownership rate rose even after prices started spiking in 2019.

It is clearly not the case that the typical American has no place to live, but some members of Congress insist on equating homelessness with problems in the broader housing market. And as a recent exchange with Rep. Maxine Waters (D‑CA) shows (watch from about 1:14:00 to 1:19:00), some members do not care to put homelessness into perspective.

Still, there is an excellent case to be made that homelessness is a serious socioeconomic problem that is much broader than just a housing problem. For instance, in self-reported data collected across 15 states, 75 percent of unsheltered homeless people claimed they had substance abuse problems. These data are consistent with other research and reports by the National Alliance to End Homelessness which show that a disproportionately large share of the homeless population experiences either mental illness or substance abuse problems.

In fact, economists studying homelessness have long incorporated these kinds of factors into their models even while recognizing that “homelessness results from an imbalance between the cost of available housing and a household’s income.” Researchers have noted, for instance, that:

“Investigation of the causes of homelessness must go beyond housing markets alone, however, because of the special characteristics of the population at risk and the public policies that address their needs. Transfer payments and policies regarding institutionalization of the mentally ill, for example, should be important determinants of the incidence of homelessness but are not part of a standard housing model.”

From 2005 to 2024, San Francisco’s homeless population rose from approximately 5,400 people to more than 8,300. Over the same period, city spending (adjusted for inflation to 2024 dollars) on its Homeless Services program went from under $77 million to over $600 million—more than $73,000 per person in 2024 (spending figures from DataSF).

As University of California, Irvine, economist Jan K. Brueckner has pointed out, it is also possible that government regulation makes housing too expensive for some people who would otherwise not be homeless. For example, building codes that prohibit the construction of dormitory-style housing with shared bathrooms and kitchens might make housing too expensive to sufficiently discourage homelessness.

Fortunately, the number of homeless people in the United States trended down from 2007 to 2019, and the number has been a small share of the population for many years. The level did spike after the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is not much higher than it was in 2007, and the rate remains lower—0.195 percent in 2023 compared to 0.215 percent in 2007—even though the total population has increased.

Still, homelessness is a problem, and most efforts to end it have failed. But to the extent that serious health and substance abuse problems are key drivers of homelessness, it is unlikely that a nationwide program of further expanding home mortgages, rent subsidies, and housing trust funds will solve the problem. Yet that policy combination is precisely what some groups promote.

The 2024 Economic Report of the President even blames “affordability constraints” on “persistent market failures in the housing market.” It then justifies both demand-side and supply-side interventions, such as grants and direct subsidies, to fix the alleged market failures. 

However, the fact that every person is unable to pay for the housing that they want is not a market failure.

In any market, for any given demand, the only way to ensure such an outcome would be to shift the supply curve so far to the right that the market price drops to effectively zero. Although we make no judgment as to how low the market price for housing or rent should be, the fact that many Americans knowingly move into higher-cost areas of the country makes it worth questioning the need for more government intervention.

Americans Regularly Move to High-Density Areas

While many policymakers argue that the typical American has become steadily more burdened by increasing housing costs, people have been consistently choosing to rent and buy in more densely populated areas. This fact suggests that they can afford to pay higher rent and housing prices. That is, people have a strong preference for certain areas—for myriad reasons—and are willing and able to pay to live in those places, as demonstrated by their actions. At the very least, many Americans are choosing to move into these higher-cost areas.

Many people have moved from higher-cost areas to lower-cost areas, such as from various places in California to Arizona, Florida, Nevada, and Texas. However, most of these people are moving from densely populated areas to other densely populated areas.

As Table 1 shows, between 2000 and 2020, when the US population increased by 18 percent, the number of people living in large metro areas increased by 32 percent. People living in the suburbs of these large metro areas increased by 48 percent, while the number of Americans living in rural areas decreased by 39 percent. (The long-term effects on this pattern from the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market remain unclear.)

None of this should be too surprising. People tend to move from higher-cost areas to lower-cost areas, but they also tend to move where other people live rather than to the middle of nowhere. They move in this manner because, from their point of view, it allows them to lower their cost of living and improve their quality of life. The federal government should remain neutral in these decisions.

Construction Has Not Evaporated

Still, critics regularly blame a shortage in newly constructed homes for the supposed housing crisis. In fact, this view became conventional wisdom long before the recent spike in home prices. In July 2017, for example, Politico published a story titled “Why Washington Can’t Fix the New Housing Crisis.” The story stated:

“The country is in the grip of a new kind of housing crisis that Washington has virtually no power to solve. The crisis is a shortage of houses. Nationally, the inventory of homes for sale has been shrinking for 24 straight months, stoking bidding wars for even the lowliest fixer-uppers. In January, a measure of supply hit its lowest in history, according to the National Association of Realtors. That scarcity has helped push the homeownership rate to a near 50-year low.”

Oddly enough, when the article was published, the homeownership rate had already rebounded from its post-2008 financial crisis low of 62.9 percent, reached in 2016. It continued to climb, and by the third quarter of 2017 it was up to 63.9 percent. This fact alone is reason to question whether “scarcity” helped push the homeownership rate down.

Given that construction steadily increased from 2011 to 2021 (Figure 2), along with the higher ownership rates and the bidding wars, it is at least plausible that higher demand—for whatever reasons it occurred—helped drive home price increases during the period.

Finally, it is unsurprising that prices would rise as demand increases because housing supply is generally more constrained than demand. It takes time to construct new housing, and many desirable areas are already densely populated. In any given geographic area, new land cannot be produced in the same way that other goods can. Yet, people can get into the market for housing rapidly, despite those supply constraints.

The pandemic price spike provides a clear example: New construction was even more constrained during the pandemic due to supply chain disruptions, and demand was heightened. This combination helps explain the severity of the price spike that followed the pandemic.

Nothing in this post implies that more construction may not be beneficial. Local housing markets experience their own unique dynamics, and there are surely many rules and regulations that could be relaxed to boost construction that would improve local markets. But those decisions are best left to state and local officials, especially because it is so difficult to objectively define a shortage or a surplus. 

The government—especially the federal government—should not be in the business of deciding the type and number of homes that people need and want.

The next post in this series examines several specific estimates of the so-called housing shortage.

Jennifer Huddleston

Ian Vásquez

Today, December 17, we’re releasing the tenth edition of the annual Human Freedom Index, which we co-publish with the Fraser Institute. The report paints a picture of the state of global freedom and freedom within 165 countries, drawing on 86 indicators of personal, economic, and civil liberties dating back to the year 2000.

The index reflects our belief that freedom should be measured carefully because it has inherent value and because it plays a central role in human progress. We define freedom as the absence of coercive constraint and think of it as a social concept that recognizes the dignity of the individual.

The following findings come from this year’s report—coauthored by Matthew Mitchell, Ryan Murphy, Guillermina Sutter Schneider, and me—and from a decade of publishing the index.

The top three countries in this year’s report are Switzerland, New Zealand, and Denmark; the bottom three are Iran, Yemen, and Syria, in descending order. The United States ranks 17th; it was 7th in the year 2000.
The high point in global human freedom since 2000, measured on a population-weighted basis, occurred in 2005–2007. It was followed by a slow decline in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and then a precipitous decline in 2020 with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, setting any gains to global freedom back more than two decades. Global freedom saw a small improvement in the third year of the pandemic, 2022, the last year for which we have internationally comparable data.
Compared to 2007, most countries are less free, having lost a significant amount of economic or personal freedom or both. 

Human freedom is strongly and positively related to well-being, including income, innovation, social tolerance, environmental performance, levels of charity, life expectancy, lower child mortality, etc.
Economic and personal freedom are strongly related. If you value high levels of personal liberty (such as freedom of expression, religion, or personal lifestyle choices), you should value a relatively high level of economic freedom, which is supportive of the other freedoms.
The world suffers from a high degree of inequality in freedom. Only 14.1% of the world’s population lives in the top quartile of countries in the index. Fully 77% of the world’s population lives in the least free countries in the bottom half of the index.
Nicaragua, Syria, Turkey, Hong Kong, and Hungary are among the top ten jurisdictions that have seen their freedoms decline most since 2007, the year that marked the high point in global freedom.
Out of ten regions, the Middle East and North Africa are the least free and are some of the regions that saw their freedom fall since 2000.
Global freedom of expression has been on a long-term decline since 2000 and is the category of freedom that saw the greatest drop since that year. 

I’m pleased to say that we’ve improved the index over time, especially in recent years, as we’ve been able to draw from more and better data sources, expand our years of coverage, and update our methodology. For that reason, I’m pleased also that the report is increasingly becoming a useful reference or research tool for journalists, scholars, and non-specialists.

To learn more about your country or the above or many other findings, see the index here. 

Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett

As part of the Cato Institute Report to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), we submitted the following recommendations to address the abuse of emergency designations and advance fiscal responsibility.

Emergency spending is out of control. Congress has designated nearly $12 trillion as emergency-related spending since 1992, circumventing statutory spending limits and enabling inflationary deficit spending. Moreover, reliance on emergency designations and powers is growing, with emergency funds accounting for 12 percent of total budget authority over the past decade. Prior emergency responses, even when unwise, end up justifying future emergency expenditures. This puts the United States in a perpetual state of emergency. Congress and the administration should rein in emergency spending.

Emergency spending surges, such as during the Great Recession and COVID-19 pandemic, are often initiated before the full scope of the emergency is fully understood, exacerbating waste, fraud, and abuse. At least $1 in every $10 of pandemic relief funds was estimated to have been stolen, wasted, or misspent. Furthermore, tens of billions in emergency funds are regularly misused for predictable, nonemergency priorities, such as annual law enforcement salaries. This violates statutory criteria for emergency designations: necessary, sudden, urgent, unforeseen, and temporary. 

This erosion of fiscal norms, in which emergency spending is paid for with borrowed funds to be repaid later, undermines the United States’ financial credibility and brings America closer to a fiscal crisis. A more prudent approach to emergencies would be limited, targeted fiscal measures offset with spending cuts to low-priority programs.

The current federal disaster relief system is a bloated mess with a patchwork of agencies that poorly handle overlapping responsibilities. The result is waste and the crowding out of state, local, and private organizations that would otherwise provide for those directly affected by disasters. 

Moreover, the existing disaster framework creates a moral hazard by covering any catastrophic costs that arise from living or developing property in high-risk areas, thus shifting the financial risk from property owners to taxpayers. This misalignment of incentives leads to escalating costs and repeated bailouts, undermining disaster preparedness, subsidizing dangerous living patterns, and promoting fiscal irresponsibility.

Congress should do the following:

Offset emergency spending by establishing a budgetary mechanism requiring any emergency funding be paid for with immediate or future spending cuts over a 5- to 10-year window.
Raise emergency spending voting thresholds by increasing the number of votes required to waive Senate points of order against emergency designations from three-fifths to three-fourths.
Restrict presidential emergency declarations to 30 days unless reauthorized by Congress.
Remove emergency spending from the budget baseline.
Require legislators to justify how new emergency expenditures meet existing emergency criteria.
Regularly track and report on emergency spending.
Rescind any remaining unobligated COVID-19 funding.
Eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Barring full repeal,

cut spending, including by ending future spending on disasters that occurred five years in the past or earlier, and
change the default cost-sharing ratio for FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund so that states pay for a larger share of the costs of disaster and recovery activities.

Privatize the National Flood Insurance Program.
Avoid enacting federal anti–price gouging laws. Allowing prices to adjust in response to changes in market conditions guarantees that goods and services demanded in disaster zones are allocated efficiently to those in greatest need.
Eliminate the Small Business Administration.
Eliminate most of the more than 30 federal entities involved in disaster recovery and consolidate only those narrowly defined legitimate federal functions into a single agency.

The president should do the following:

Direct a government-wide review of all disaster-related programs to identify overlap and eliminate redundant or low-performing initiatives.
Make National Emergency Act expenditure reports more detailed and publicly available.
Reject appropriations bills that contain phony emergency designations.
If the president requests an emergency supplemental package, he should

justify why each emergency provision meets statutory criteria for emergencies, and
offer rescissions to offset new emergency expenditures.

Jeffrey A. Singer

On December 10, the country’s first state-sanctioned overdose prevention center (OPC) held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Providence, Rhode Island. The center, located at 45 Willard Avenue, near the Rhode Island Hospital campus, was established and will be operated by the private non-profit harm reduction organization Project Weber/​RENEW.

In July 2021, Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee signed into law a bill authorizing two pilot OPCs in the state, which would receive no taxpayer funding and be regulated, inspected, and licensed by the Rhode Island Department of Health. Once it gets the final green light from the Department of Health, the center will open.

As I wrote in a 2023 Cato Policy Analysis, “OPCs have a more-than-30-year track record of preventing overdose deaths, HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases, and of helping people with substance use disorder find treatment. As of August 2022, 147 OPCs are providing services in 91 communities in 16 countries.” The first government-sanctioned OPC began operating in Bern, Switzerland, in 1986 and continues to operate.

Two city-sanctioned OPCs have been operating in New York City since the end of 2021. By the summer of 2023, they reversed more than 1,000 overdoses. A study reported earlier this year in The Lancet examined the overdose mortality rates in Toronto, Canada, between May 2017, when nine OPCs opened in the city, and December 2019. They found that overdose fatalities dropped significantly during that period in neighborhoods surrounding the OPCs but not in other neighborhoods.

The Providence OPC will have eight injection/​us booths and two smoking rooms that can accommodate an additional eight people for smoking. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, an increasing number of people are smoking fentanyl rather than injecting it. With drug dealers increasingly offering fentanyl in pill form rather than as a powder, users are finding it more convenient to crush and smoke the substance instead of dissolving the powder for injection.

Advocates for public health have urged individuals who use drugs to transition to non-injection methods, as these are associated with a lower risk of skin infections, soft tissue damage, and blood-borne diseases. Smoking fentanyl may also decrease the risk of overdose because it enables users to adjust the dosage better to reach their intended effect, a process that is more challenging with injection. This switch to smoking might help explain the recent tapering of the drug overdose death rate.

Unfortunately, while the New York City and Providence OPCs are officially sanctioned in their local jurisdictions, they remain federally illegal because of 21 U.S.C. Section 856, the so-called “crack house statute,” which federally prohibits entities from knowingly permitting people to use federally illicit substances on their premises. Thus far, the Department of Justice has exercised prosecutorial discretion by not moving in to shut down these centers and arrest those who operate them. But that might change in the incoming administration. Congress should repeal or amend the law to allow OPCs to save lives in states and cities that sanction them.

Michael F. Cannon

Via this Cato white paper, I submitted the following recommendations to the “Department of Government Efficiency,” a private-sector organization that will advise President-elect Donald Trump on how to reduce inefficiency in the federal government. The following recommendations would achieve the Democratic goal of limiting the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance and the Republican goal of giving workers greater control over their health care dollars and decisions, all in a manner that is budget-neutral and more politically durable than past efforts. I further submitted recommendations relating to federal health spending and federal regulatory policy. The three sets of recommendations operationalize the reforms I propose in my latest book, Recovery: A Guide to Reforming the U.S. Health Sector (Cato Institute, 2023). 

In a free market, consumers would control 100 percent of health spending. The government would control 0 percent. In the United States, the government controls 84 percent of health spending. That’s one of the highest shares among advanced nations. It’s just 5 percentage points behind communist Cuba. The result is that the health sector does what the government and special interests want—not what consumers want.

At more than $1 trillion per year, the largest source of compulsory health spending is employer-sponsored health insurance. The federal tax code effectively compels workers to let their employers control a sizeable chunk of their compensation, about $18,000 of the average family’s earnings, and their choice of health plan.

This regressive policy makes health care less universal. It increases health care prices by reducing price competition. It reduces health care quality by penalizing delivery innovations, such as electronic medical records and care coordination. It reduces health insurance quality by compelling workers to purchase coverage that predictably and routinely disappears after patients get sick, leaving them with uninsurable preexisting conditions. These burdens fall hardest on the most vulnerable patients.

Tax-free universal health accounts (UHAs) would return that $1 trillion to the workers who earn it and restore workers’ freedom to make their own health decisions. UHAs would make health care more universal—better, more affordable, more equitable, and more secure.

The federal government should do the following:

Replace all health-related tax preferences with a single income- and payroll-tax exclusion for deposits into worker-owned, tax-free UHAs.
Set UHA deposit limits for individuals and families at levels that achieve revenue neutrality.
Allow patients to use UHA funds to purchase any health insurance plan from any source, tax-free.

Norbert Michel

The Wall Street Journal reports President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers are exploring “pathways to dramatically shrink, consolidate, or even eliminate the top bank watchdogs in Washington.” These kinds of reforms can’t come soon enough.

As Cato’s new report to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) explains, US financial markets have too many regulations and too many regulators. Many of the regulations protect incumbent firms, exacerbate instability, and inflate costs. Many of the regulators possess redundant authority.

There’s a good case to be made for scrapping pretty much the whole framework. But elected officials can make many important improvements without doing anything so controversial as a complete reboot. This post offers a few ideas for improving things on the banking side.

To start, banks do not need more than one federal regulator. That much should be obvious, but getting from the current system to there will be tricky because so many agencies are currently involved in regulating banks. Here’s one approach that might work:

Make the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency the federal regulator for all banks with more than $15 billion in assets. (It’s an arbitrary cutoff that would leave the Comptroller regulating about 100 banks. Don’t get hung up on the number.)
Make Fed district banks the federal regulator for banks in their districts with less than $15 billion.
Remove the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s examination authority.
Remove the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s regulatory responsibilities and convert it to a bank resolution agency that administers deposit insurance.
Eliminate the Fed’s Vice Chair of Supervision.

These changes would be a great starting point for reforming bank regulation. But the folks at DOGE could offer up even more improvements that fall short of replacing the whole regulatory framework. Just a few examples include:

Eliminate the ability of federal regulators to use reputational risk in their examinations.
Create a materiality threshold for all safety and soundness risks.
Create a materiality threshold for all federal regulatory directives, such as Matters Requiring Attention.
Transfer all regulatory authority for Bank Secrecy Act rules and regulations from the Fed and the OCC to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network or the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
Remove the concept of “abusive practices” from federal consumer protection statutes, reverting to the standard (time-tested) legal standards for “unfair” and “deceptive” practices.

If the administration and Congress can implement any similar reform package, it would also be the perfect time to shrink federal deposit insurance limits and get rid of the systemic risk exception for covering uninsured deposits.

The current “cap” of $250,000 is far above both the median account balance (approximately $5,000) and the average balance ($42,000). Even most high-income families have balances well below the $250,000 cap—as of 2023, the average balance for the highest 10 percent of income earners, surely biased upward by very high earners, was $229,000.

The current FDIC caps simply have nothing to do with protecting the typical American.

Of course, the DOGE folks could push for a much longer list of reforms. For instance, there is no reason for the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau to exist given that another federal agency (the Federal Trade Commission) already exists to police consumer protection standards. Nor is it necessary to have a federal agency (the Federal Housing Finance Agency) to regulate essentially just two companies. Similarly, Congress could eliminate the National Credit Union Administration because it basically regulates banks—the Fed or the OCC could regulate those credit unions, depending on the size.

The system is bad, and the reform list goes on.

Stephen Slivinski

I don’t like the Elf on the Shelf.

For those not in the know (or who don’t have kids), the Elf on the Shelf is a small, plush creature you place somewhere in your home—on a shelf perhaps—in advance of Christmas that is purported to be Santa’s eyes and ears on the scene, reporting back to him all the naughty things your kids might do in November and December … if only he can stay out of trouble himself which, as anyone who ventures onto Instagram during the holidays can confirm, is almost never.

Call me grinchy but I never started the tradition in our home (although we certainly have lots of traditions that we like). I dislike the idea of cuteifying the surveillance state. (But maybe I’m weird? I also have concerns that my fellow Generations Xers had no-knock police raids normalized for them as children after watching the Kool-Aid Man burst through walls unannounced for a decade on television.)

I was reminded of the Elf on the Shelf tradition when I saw a November press release from the National Association of State Contractors Licensing Agencies (NASCLA). (Yes, Virginia, there is a trade association for contractor occupational licensing boards.)

In the press release, the NASCLA touts the operation they coordinated with their elves on the shelf—19 licensing boards and regulatory agencies across 13 states and the District of Columbia—near the end of October, targeting at least a couple thousand job sites. When a violation was uncovered, the penalties included “administrative citations, criminal notices, legal actions, and [the initiation of] further investigations.”

Were these violations the result of site visits designed to seek out and penalize those performing or overseeing shoddy construction work? Nope. The purpose of these enforcement operations was to, according to the press release again, “protect consumers and the public by ensuring contractors and tradespeople are properly licensed and registered.” In other words, to make sure the workers had the right permission slip from the government.

One of the biggest myths about government occupational licensing—a myth usually perpetuated by the boards themselves—is that licensing boards often police standards or that licensing is itself an effective way to ensure quality. For starters, there is little evidence that licensing requirements increase quality of services, regardless of how actively a board enforces state law. Simply having a license is not a good proxy for whether someone provides quality work. Justifying enforcement actions like the NASCLA does based on that equivalency is misguided.

Empirical evidence is emerging that many, if not most, of the occupational board enforcement actions aren’t related to complaints about workmanship at all. A recent first-of-its-kind study by occupational licensing researchers Conor Norris, Alex Adams, and Edward Timmons looked at newly-released public records of four Idaho state licensing board enforcement actions, including at least one year of that state’s Contractors Board, between 2013 and 2018. More than half of the average overall enforcement actions by the boards were mostly just “let me see your papers”-type checks or violations of technical aspects of the licensing law.

At least the Elf on the Shelf is supposed to encourage good behavior. The licensing version of Elf on the Shelf is merely interested in whether you have the governmentally mandated paperwork.

Luckily, there is an alternative: get rid of licensing laws and the boards that enforce them. They can be replaced by some form of private certification.

And there’s a good alternative to the Elf on the Shelf creatures: toss them in the trash and replace them with … well, frankly, anything else.